A Simple Approach to Write Thesis

Abstract (<= 1 page)

 one page stating what the thesis is about
 highlight the contributions of the thesis

Chapter 1: Introduction (~5-10 pages)

 Background of the study
o What is the context of this problem? In what situation or environment can this
problem be observed? In other words, background of study would locate your
thesis in the context of the field and related fields, explaining why what you had
to say was important and original (normally it's a requirement of a thesis that it
makes an "original contribution to scholarship").
 Problem Statement
o Here are several key tips for writing a problem statement:
o Write out your vision: In order to decide what must be done when solving the
problem, it is important to understand the vision. Be sure to include the benefit of
solving the problem. Take the time to write your vision clearly and concisely.
o Write out your issue statement: Write an issue statement that describes the
problem and why solving the problem is important. This two-sentence statement
simply describes the problems that you are encountering and specific issues
related to the problem.
o Organize your method: Writing out the method that you plan to use to solve the
problem is a crucial part of writing out your problem statement. It is through your
method that you convey the steps that you will take in solving the problem.
o Use your "Ws.": Think back to grade school and you will recall how your
English teacher probably taught you about the five "Ws" – who, what, where,
when, and why - questions that you need to answer when writing an essay. As you
proceed to write your problem statement, you should incorporate the five Ws, and
answer them completely.
o You should be thinking about:
- Who the problem affects
- What the outcome would be if the problem was not solved
- Where the problem is taking place
- When the problem needs to be fixed
- Why is it important for the problem to be fixed
o Here are a few examples of questions to be answered:
- Is the problem short-term or will it continues into the future?
- How many people are affected by this problem?
- Would this research revise existing knowledge or practices? If so, how?
o Once you answer the questions you have posed, you should have a pretty well
rounded problem statement. Make a few drafts until the problem statement is as
polished as possible. Read more at http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/for-
 students-and-parents/tips-on-writing-a-problem-
statement.html#jY7XXSWkjQ7rHzTZ.99
 Motivation
o Why is this problem you've worked on important?
 Goals / Objectives
o What are you trying to do and why?
o How will you or the reader know if or when you've met your objectives?
o What are linkages (and their order) among various objectives (one paragraph)?
 **** Contributions *****
o What is new, different, better, significant?
o Why is the world a better place because of what you've done?
o What have you contributed to the field of research?
o What is now known/possible/better because of your thesis?
 Scope and Limitations
o States the assumptions (constructs being taken as given, usually four kinds:
general methodological assumptions, theoretical assumptions, topic-specific
assumptions, and assumptions about instruments or methods) being accepted for
the study and the limitations (things the study does not do either intentionally or
because of inherent design limitations).
o Your study, like all research, necessarily takes many things for granted. In legal
terminology, it "stipulates" them. Specifically, two issues must be addressed
about your assumptions: (a) Where do they come from? (b) How far down the
"chain of assumptions" must you go in identifying them and supporting them?
o There are basically two forms of limitations you must discuss. The first group
comprises any important issues regarding your research problem which for one
reason or another you are not going to investigate. The second group contains
elements of the study that limit its power, validity or credibility, its capacity for
generalization, and so on. In other words, flaws in the design.
 Outline/organization of the thesis (optional)

Chapter 2: Literature Review / Related Work (~8-20 pages)

 Literature review is normally chapter two, and is a study of other people's work in the
field/ topic you are researching on. Your work is not 100% your creation. It is an
improvement of so many other people's work. Literature review is a way of showing you
are not repeating what has already been done but that you are improving on what is
already obtainable. Simply writing descriptions about used general tools, modeling and
equipment are not literature review, and it can be added in relevance sections of
methodology chapter.
 More than a literature review
 Organize related work - impose structure
 Be clear as to how previous work being described relates to your own.
 The reader should not be left wondering why you've described something!!
 Critique the existing work - Where is it strong where is it weak? What are the
unreasonable/undesirable assumptions?
  Identify opportunities for more research (i.e., your thesis) Are there unaddressed, or more
important related topics?
 After reading this chapter, one should understand the motivation for and importance of
your thesis
 You should clearly and precisely define all of the key concepts dealt with in the rest of
the thesis, and teach the reader what s/he needs to know to understand the rest of the
thesis.

Chapter 3: Methodology / Theory / Solution / Program /

Problem (~15-30 pages)
 continuing from Chapter 2 explain the issues
 outline your solution / extension / refutation

Chapter 4: Implementation / Formalism (~15-30 pages)

 not every thesis has or needs an implementation

Chapter 5: Results and Discussions (~15-30 pages)

 adequacy, efficiency, productiveness, effectiveness (choose your criteria, state them
clearly and justify them)
 be careful that you are using a fair measure, and that you are actually measuring what you
claim to be measuring
 if comparing with previous techniques those techniques must be described in Chapter 2
 be honest in evaluation
 admit weaknesses
 keep in mind that explanation/discussions in report should be written such a way that
reader can understand all results and its inferences perfectly without your face-to-face
clarification, because this report is for third person to read, not for you

Chapter 6: Conclusions and Recommendations (~5-10 pages)

 State what you've done and what you've found
 Summarize contributions (achievements and impact)
 Outline drawbacks/limitations of your research findings and provide suggestions for
improvement, essentially modifications/corrections in your adapted approach
 Outline open issues/directions for future work, essentially expansion/extension of your
work

Bibliography / References
 Include references to:
 o credit others for their work
o help to distinguish your work from others
o provide pointers to further detailed readings
o support your claims (if evidence can be found in others work)
 Ensure that ALL bibliographic entries are complete including: authors, title, journal or
conference, volume and number of journals, date of publication and page numbers. Be
careful to at least be consistent in punctuation.
 Learn how to use a good typesetting program that can track and format bibliographic
references (e.g., groff, latex, frame).
 Within the text of the thesis, a reference with a number of people can be referred to as
Lastname et al. (where et al appears in italics and the al is followed by a period).
 My personal view is that URL's are not valid bibliographic references. They and their
contents change and they often contain material that has not been refereed.

Appendix
 Include technical material that would disrupt the flow of the thesis.
 Included for curious or disbelieving readers

Writing Hints
 For English: The general rule (like most things in English) is try common sense. If your
report is on events that happened in the past, use the past tense; if it refers to the present
or to eternal truths, use the present tense. In the conclusions to your report, you may use
the past if the conclusions refer to a specific state of affairs in the past, or the present if
you're confident that your discoveries are universal or continue to be true. Further, it
would be better if use only third person throughout report rather than first and second
persons.
 The project report or thesis presents the results of your (tedious) work. In most cases this
document is available to a much larger audience than your work (experiment, prototype
etc.). Thus, the quality of your work is often evaluated based on your document only.
You should put every effort in preparing and writing your thesis!
 Start early with your writing! Do not wait until your practical/theoretical/simulation
work (project, implementation etc.) has been concluded. Plan your document right from
the beginning and fill in parts over time.
 Document your progress throughout the whole project or master thesis. These notes,
reports or protocols help in your writing process. This is especially true when you do
research on the state of the art or related work. Without detailed notes most parts of the
literature study must be conducted again at the time of writing the corresponding parts of
your thesis.
 Before handing in a copy of what you've written you should proof read it and make
corrections yourself. Be critical of your own work when you do this. You should
think not only about syntax and grammar but about the structure of the document
 and whether or not you are making good arguments and whether or not someone
else will be able to follow and believe what you are saying. You should repeat this
process a large number of times before you hand in a copy. Far too many people
type something in, print it out and hand it in. If this is the case you as a student are
not doing your job. It is not your supervisor's job to write your thesis.
 Try to aim for around 100 pages or less.
 Including a glossary or list of acronyms may be helpful.
 Start thinking about what your contributions are early on.
o How is what you are doing interesting and important?
o How will it make the world a better place?
o What are you doing or discovering that hasn't already been done or isn't already
known?
 For many people it is best to start by writing the "guts" of the thesis, Chapters 3, 4 and 5.
In some cases the results and conclusions may not be known (or may change) while
doing these chapters.
 Chapters 3, 4 and 5 can take on different forms depending on the thesis and approaches
being used.
 Sometimes design, implementation and performance are subsections within chapters and
the chapters are broken down by other criteria.
 Remember (especially those doing experiments) that you must include enough detail in
your thesis so that someone else could read your thesis and reproduce your results -
without ever talking to you.
 The word performance is by itself quite meaningless. Stating that you've improved
performance significantly does not tell the reader anything. There are problems with the
word performance and the word improved. Remember that there are often a number of
different performance metrics that can be applied to a system. Instead of using the word
performance state precisely what performance metric is improved. Also improved may
also be potentially ambiguous. State precisely what you mean. For example: The mean
response time has been decreased by 20%. Peak bandwidth has been increased by 40%.
 Try to get an outline and style guidelines from someone else for the system you use for
formatting your thesis.
 Consistent terminology/symbols: Use the same terminology for the same concept
throughout your thesis. This is especially true for symbols in your equation.
 Abbreviations: Before you use an abbreviation you should introduce it, i.e., write the
term and put the abbreviation in parentheses afterwards. Avoid abbreviations in the title
and chapter/section headings (unless they are known for a general audience).
 All figures included should add to the work. As such, there should be text included that
refers to the figures (preferably before the figure is encountered). The text should explain
what the reader should get from the figure - what are they supposed to notice and what is
the figure explaining. Often people just include a figure with no reference to the figure
and no explanation of what the figure is for - if the figure was not included no one would
notice (this is not a good approach). Note that when referring to a figure or a section by
name they should be capitalized as in -- Figure 3.1 shows the architecture of our system
or in Section 4 we describe the experimental methodology.
 Newest pet peeve. You do not write 3.3GHz or 16GB you write 3.3 GHz or 16 GB. This
is equivalent to saying you are 6feet tall (instead of 6 feet tall).
  Using and misusing abbreviations.
o The word "it's" is an abbreviation of "it is" it is NOT a possessive form of "it".
o The abbreviation of the phrase "for example" is written "e.g.". It contains a period
after the "e" and one after the "g". A comma is also usually required with its use.
This is an sentence that uses "for example" (e.g., this is how to use for example).
Quite often it is enclosed in parentheses and you should avoid using it too often.
o The abbreviation of the phrase "that is" is written "i.e.". It contains a period after
the "i" and one after the "e". A comma is also usually required with is use. This is
a sentence containing an example of how to use "that is" (i.e., this sentence is the
example). Quite often it is enclosed in parentheses and you should avoid using it
too often.
o Don't use the abbreviation "etc.". The use of etc. is usually an admission of
ignorance. It is like admitting that the list you've given is not complete but you
don't know what is missing. If you did know what was missing the list would be
complete".
 You should purchase and use a book like "The Elements of Style" by Stunk and White.

Plagiarism
 You must not make minor modifications to someone else's work and include it in your
own work. This approach will show excessive similarity index.
 If you want to explain someone else's work the best approach is to read it over, put it
aside, and then write in your own words what that work is about (do this without
referring to the original source, if message is general; otherwise cite ref. if derived
significantly from research part of it). This approach will avoid/minimize similarity index
well within limit.

(Adapted from "The Guaranteed Mackworth Thesis Formula", by Alan Mackworth, revised by
Tim Brecht, thanks to Ondrej Lhotak for an addition to the Background and Related Work
section)